by Nicky Black
Tommy didn’t answer, so Jed stepped in.
‘Did she get the message out?’
‘Aye, loud and clear.’
‘Generator company’s pulled out, though,’ said Jed, nudging Tommy for a reaction. ‘And this place is full of pigs.’ He nudged Tommy harder, frowning. ‘Look, man!’
Tommy followed his eyes to the bar, his mind still on Tucker. ‘Jimmy’s got an old generator,’ he said, mechanically, ‘but it won’t last all night. We’ll have to use the one at the farm.’
Frankie shifted in his seat away from the couple next to him, embarrassed by their smooching. ‘Where’s your lass, like?’ he asked Jed, who answered him with a blank stare. ‘Just asking. Nice lass, that’s all.’
Jed leant forward. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ he said, voice teasingly wanton. ‘Really nice tits, lovely wet bits.’ He licked his lips as he said the word “lovely.”
Frankie swallowed, and Tommy gazed heavenwards. ‘Pack it in,’ he said. ‘And you, put your hands back on that table.’
Frankie obeyed, sheepishly. ‘Why does he get to manage the lasses, like?’ he asked.
‘Because he’s married,’ said Jed, ‘and you smell.’
Tommy should have laughed but he didn’t have it in him. The coppers at the bar were laughing, he noticed, pretending to have fun. Tommy even recognised one of them – the boulder of an officer who’d taken him in for the line-up.
Divs.
‘Giz a tab, Frankie,’ he sighed. He needed to concentrate on other things, and he shook his head free of Tucker’s eyes, the same colour as his mother’s.
Frankie doled out the cigarettes and Tommy held up his hand for the lighter which Jed lobbed to him across the table. It dropped from Tommy’s hand onto the floor.
‘Let’s hope Farmer Dawson’s stocked up on generator fuel,’ Tommy said, bending down to pick up the lighter. As he reached for it, another hand got there first and picked it up. He looked into the droopy brown eyes of the Guinness-drinking lover boy, a dead roll-up hanging from his lips.
‘Cadge a light, chief?’ the man asked in an accent that reminded Tommy of Coronation Street. The fella looked directly at him as he took the lighter and sat up, lit his roll-up, and turned back to his girlfriend. Only the smile he was giving her now wasn’t dreamy and amorous, but shrewd and victorious.
***
It was gone three in the morning and Tommy approached Holly Drive with the weight of the night’s failures hanging over him like a monsoon about to break. He’d been denied entry into every club. Huge men in black suits held their hands against his chest, no eye contact required. They bent down to his ear.
Fuck off home.
Even Hadgy Dodds was absent from the door at Phutures. Tucker had put the message out, and every bouncer had been given Tommy’s name and description.
It had taken him over an hour to trudge home, his legs leaden, his body heavy as a millstone. He stood regretfully at his front door, the house across the street exhaling a death rattle, the smell and taste of scorched timbers feeling woefully ordinary.
He put the key in the door and pushed it open.
Inside, the house was painfully quiet, void of any comfort, Sam and Ashleigh tucked up in Jed’s bedroom out of Paul Smart’s reach. Tommy fell onto the sofa, pulling the bent and battered Smarties tubes from his inside pocket. He looked at them blearily and wiped at his nose. He lay down, closed his eyes, and prayed for a miracle, for there was nothing else that would save him now.
SATURDAY
TOMMY
The morning announced itself in a bulldozer of light, springing his eyes open. He sat up sharply, one of his feet still flat on the floor where he’d left it a few hours earlier, sleep finally taking him as the sky began to brighten. On the carpet, the tubes of ecstasy lay in a small heap, and the night came flooding back with painful clarity: the bouncers’ whispered threats, sound, lighting, deposits for the chippies, all out of reach without the cash. Tucker’s below-the-belt lies, and Loverboy’s eyes looking into his with the gratified smugness of someone who’d got exactly what they came for.
Tommy had mentioned Farmer Dawson’s name.
The cops.
They knew.
He dug into his back pocket and brought out a fiver and a few coins. It was all he had to his name. Might cover the bus fare to Berwick; sixty miles north, not far enough away from Paul Smart.
The living room was still a mess from the police raid. The videos were scattered in front of the television, Grandad’s photograph face down next to the gas fire. Tommy rose stiffly from the sofa and bent down to prop the photograph up against the fire. The glass was broken, pieces of it falling onto the fireplace. He picked the picture up, loosened the frame and pulled the photograph from it, remembering the stroke that had the grumpy old bugger confined to a bed in the living room for weeks while the powers that be decided what to do with him. Tommy had just turned eighteen, and Jed’s mother had once again risen to the challenge, bringing gallons of soup and plated corned-beef pies daily, happy to order the district nurses around to her heart’s delight. Just a week after Tommy met Sam, the second stroke took Grandad before the council had to spend any money on him.
Tommy slid the print from the broken glass and looked down into Grandad’s proud, young face, his shadowy eyes looking directly at him. In the clarity of the picture, now free of its yellowing glass, Tommy saw something new in those eyes: challenge, bravery, and not a small amount of cunning.
One: work hard, play hard.
The rapping on the front door made him start and the photograph fell to his feet. With a rush of dread, he stumbled into the hallway and opened the door, expecting Paul Smart’s fist to hit him square in the face. Instead, he looked down at Trevor Logan who squinted up at him as if he too had just woken up.
Trevor pulled a plastic carrier bag from the back of a pair of jeans that hung from his thin hips. He held it up. ‘Where’s the venue?’
Bank notes revealed themselves through the thin white plastic, and his heart began to thud.
‘It’s your fucking money, man, howay,’ said Trevor.
Tommy’s mind did cartwheels. Peach would know the venue by now; not many Farmer Dawsons to choose from. So, what was the point if he couldn’t even get the rave started? Paul Smart would be there with his henchmen, and now Trevor Logan could rack up with whatever he had up his sleeve. He could be brave, cunning, like Grandad, or he could run for his life.
‘The venue,’ said Trevor.
Tommy stared at the bag in Trevor’s hand. The money … his money. His profit. It would get them further than Berwick.
‘Groat Hall Farm,’ Tommy said. And the money was in his hands.
‘And don’t you be worrying about the pigs, neither.’ Trevor grinned and touched his nose. ‘We’ve got that sorted.’
That “we” again.
With that, Trevor turned and sauntered down the path, and Tommy walked into the living room on hollow legs, sinking onto the sofa, Grandad staring up at him as if egging him on.
And then, it was if someone had flipped a switch. He saw it. It dominated the photograph, vast and magnificent, Grandad dwarfed to insignificance by its presence.
The aircraft hangar.
‘What you doing?’ The doorway framed Jed’s silhouette. ‘You’re door’s wide open, man. You should’ve come to ours, you wazzock.’
Getting to his feet, Tommy held out the carrier bag to Jed who took it and peered inside.
‘You sold them?’ His eyes were wider than his mother’s hips.
Tommy shook his head, trying to suppress his giddiness. ‘Trevor Logan,’ he said.
Jed’s face collapsed. ‘Jesus, man, Tommy. More wankers to deal with.’
‘It’s ours,’ said Tommy, ‘the takings from last week.’
‘Ha!’ Jed laughed, but then his face turned serious, his eyes sombre as if trying to read Tommy’s thoughts. ‘What you gonna do?’
Tommy looked back at his friend, a m
an who’d been more than a brother to him his whole life. He could run away, live somewhere else a pauper.
Or they could pull off the biggest party to hit the north-east.
Tommy picked up the photograph from the floor and held it up to Jed, his finger tapping at the inscription under Grandad’s picture:
Evershott Airfield, Northumberland.
Jed’s eyes scanned it, his initial confusion turning to realisation. ‘Are you taking the actual piss?’
The reply rested in Tommy’s face.
‘You know what this means?’ Jed’s face was grave, but Tommy sensed the exhilaration that zinged between them. He knew exactly what it meant. If he cheated Paul Smart, he’d never be able to show his face in Newcastle again; the city where he was born, the city he’d been proud of all his life. Though now, he wasn’t so sure. There were too many risks, too many memories. Too many people that made it lousy.
‘You better fucking come with us,’ said Tommy.
But Jed swallowed his reply, breathing deeply before putting a hand on Tommy’s shoulder and looking him straight in the eye.
‘We’re gonna have that bastard, comrade,’ he said.
PEACH
Murphy had found the nearest telephone box to the pub, had been through the Phone Book and located the only Farmer Dawson in the region, delivering the message to Peach in three short words: Groat Hall Farm. Murphy had driven down there in the dead of night, found a note pinned to the front door of the farmhouse in a misspelt scrawl: “Back Sunday nite. Anyone touches my cows, your dead.”
The DCI leant over his desk, circled the farm’s location on the road map he’d spread out next to a pile of two hundred or so flyers: “Space Generation” they read, and Peach recognised the alien faces from Tommy’s sketch pad which still lounged by his feet.
Placing the pen next to the map, he checked the clock, the minutes ticking towards nine o’clock as slowly as January. Sally grinned up at him from the framed photograph, and his eyes absorbed her placid face. Her cheeks had had colour earlier that morning, her eyes brighter, her mood cautious but cheerful. Pamela had just arrived for her shift and handed him the tea without him even having to ask – and in a proper mug, too, not the half-measure nonsense of a polystyrene cup. The woman made good tea, he’d give her that, and he’d found himself wondering what her mince and dumplings tasted like as he watched her chatting to Sally.
Peach sat back in his office chair, his foot catching on the portfolio of Tommy’s drawings. He blinked at it for a moment before bending down to pick it up, needing something to occupy his mind while the clock tick-ticked in time with his impatience.
He opened it and drew out the sketch pad, flipping the paper over to the image of the alien invasion. His fingers hovered over the face of the boy, desperately ogling the retreating spaceship. Looking at it properly this time, he focused on Tommy’s teenage face: Please! it cried. The epitome of painful longing.
He turned slowly to the next page, his head lurching away from the image. Paul Smart stared brutally back at him. It was an uncanny likeness and he drew the pad closer to his face to admire the detailed lines of Paul’s features, the shadows under his squat chin and the perfect curling of his earlobes. But it was the eyes that drew him in, eyes so alive that Peach half expected them to blink. They were eyes that lied with frightening conviction.
He lifted the page carefully and flicked it over the top of the pad: a young woman holding a tiny baby, their noses and foreheads touching. Sam Collins’s eyes were closed, lashes gently brushing the top of her cheek. The newborn, lips slightly parted, slept unperturbed, arms falling by her side in a peaceful lull. It was almost religious in its purity, love oozing from the paper: baby, mother, and observer.
Peach felt his throat constrict, wanting to tear his eyes away from it, but unable to control the focus of his gaze. He dropped the pad as if it had stung him, and he grasped his mouth with his hand. Hadn’t he wanted the best possible life for his daughter? Hadn’t he dreamed of her success and happiness? A life free of want, hardship, violence? Hadn’t he vowed, when she was a tiny innocent like the child before him, that he would protect her from those things? He’d failed; his own selfish grief consuming him to the point of neglect.
His office door swung open and Murphy entered wearing a gaping yawn and a pair of khaki trousers sporting more pockets than the Little Match Girl’s frock. Murphy drew a white paper bag from one of the pockets and threw it onto Peach’s desk. It smelt better than good, the vapours of sausage, egg, and brown sauce reaching Peach’s nose in seconds. All he needed was a bucket of tea to wash it down with, and, as if by magic, Sharon was at his door with a tray of two steaming mugs.
‘The answer’s “no”, chief,’ said Murphy, ‘I can’t marry you, it’s too soon.’
‘Very funny,’ said Peach, drily, putting the sketch pad down and reaching for the bag.
Sharon had put the mugs down and was picking up the drawing of Sam and Ashleigh, her expression turning to one of reverence. ‘Oh, sir, it’s beautiful,’ she gasped. ‘Did you …?’ She looked at him with astonishment, hope even.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Peach, snatching the sketch pad back. ‘Haven’t you got anything better to do?’
Indignation settled in her face, and she turned and walked from the office giving Murphy a sod-you-and-your-favours look.
‘Sit down,’ said Peach.
Murphy obeyed, not before bending to one side and extracting another greasy bag of fat from a pocket. He tore it open and tucked in. ‘What’s the plan, chief?’
The plan was this, Peach began: they’d make their way to the farm in the next hour, be there before anyone else, hide out in one of the farm house’s upstairs rooms and wait for Paul Smart and his drugs to arrive.
‘What about the boss, boss …?’ Murphy looked over his shoulder towards Superintendent McNally’s office.
McNally was on a trip to the Welsh coast to visit his new grandchild. The timing couldn’t have been better, and the message in Peach’s eyes was clear when Murphy turned back to him.
Murphy whistled, whether in agreement or unease Peach wasn’t sure.
‘We’ll arrest Smart,’ said Peach, ‘and Tommy will pay his dues when he arrives.’ Every penny and every piece of equipment would be confiscated. No one would ever work with him again. ‘There’ll be no more all-night raves in Tyneside.’
Murphy was quiet, looking at his butty before taking a bite. ‘Thing is,’ he said between swallows, ‘looks to me like he’s just trying to make something of himself, you know, for his wife and kid. It’s nature, ain’t it? That your kids have a better life than you.’
Peach wasn’t up for a lecture. ‘There’s people in danger because of him.’
Murphy continued to chew, unmoved by Peach’s claim. ‘Has anyone ever told you, you don’t listen, boss?’
Peach drew back his chin. McNally had done so, repeatedly, but never his inferiors. They wouldn’t dare.
‘Look, why don’t you rethink things,’ said Murphy. ‘You could set up a meeting with the council or summat. Maybe get the raves run legit, licenses and all that. Then you could police them properly.’
Peach recoiled at the suggestion. Drug dens run as legitimate businesses?
‘Listen.’ Murphy’s expression was thoughtful, even a little patronising. ‘Times are different now, know what I mean? There’s been drugs long before there’s been raves. Youngsters …’ He waved his arm around the room as if it were occupied by grisly teenagers. ‘They just want to be free, y’know? They want to do what they want to do, party if they want to party. Shouldn’t we be making sure they do it without killing themselves?’
Peach understood the implication. If the rave last Saturday night had been policed, if it had been legal and organised, Sally wouldn’t be where she was. Or would the likes of Darren Adams-Deighton and Paul Smart simply find another way to make their profits? The city’s night clubs were hardly drug free.
He drew
the sandwich from its bag, lifted it to his mouth. Negotiation was not on the table. He was going to put Paul Smart behind bars, put a stop to the parties, confiscate the takings, and anything else he could get his hands on.
He kept his eyes on his food as he spoke. ‘You’re either with me, or you’re not.’ He bit into his sandwich, heard Murphy’s heavy sigh and imagined his rolling eyes.
‘I’m a copper,’ said Murphy. ‘And what copper would say no to a fucking full-on stakeout?’
Peach chewed silently. Job done.
‘She’s right, though, Shazza.’ Murphy nodded at the drawing of Sam and Ashleigh, still lying face up on Peach’s desk. ‘It’s stunning, that.’
Murphy stood, picked up his bacon butty and his tea and left the office, leaving Peach to stare down at Tommy’s drawing.
The man was talented, no doubt about it. But talented people had to abide by the law, just like everyone else.
TOMMY
He sat silently with Sam, Barry, and Davie Foster, Ashleigh in her highchair and Betty in her element, replenishing the plate of hot breakfast in the middle of the kitchen table, telling Tommy he’d need his sustenance.
Jed had given his family a half-story earlier that morning before heading out with the cash to pay the personnel. They’d recovered the takings from the last rave, he’d said, and the party was going ahead. Just a small affair, probably their last.
‘About bloody time,’ Davie had said, flicking his newspaper. ‘Time and tide wait for no man, Gerald.’
‘Will there be gangsters?’ Barry had asked. He’d seen the news items too over the past few days, and Betty had given Tommy a look of concern.
Sam’s smile was anxious but resolute now as Tommy sat opposite her, Grandad’s photograph rolled up in his back pocket. He picked up a fork and jabbed at a fat sausage. They couldn’t discuss the plan, not until they had the money in their hands. London, they’d decided. Tommy could pick up work on the building sites and go from there. The money would pay the extortionate rent until he got qualified and could earn more. It would buy Sam a car and she could start her hairdressing business. Anyone could walk into a construction job in London, everybody said so. Anyone could disappear. Still, something about the nation’s Capital seemed foreign to him, more alien than the Martians he imagined making friends with one day. He tried to place himself there, with Sam and the baby, amidst the torrent of people, the towering buildings, the tourists, and the traffic jams, but the whole place was a big blur to him. He would be a nobody there, a cog in the wheel. But they’d be safe.